


Making Time

by timeandcelery



Category: Doctor Who (1963)
Genre: F/M, Fix-It, Fluff, Found Families, Friendship, Hugs, M/M, Major Character Injury, Really Just A Lot Of Hugs, Season 6B, Weddings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-06
Updated: 2017-08-06
Packaged: 2018-12-12 03:01:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 5,192
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11728134
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/timeandcelery/pseuds/timeandcelery
Summary: During Season 6B, four unexpected reunions.(Injury tag is just to be safe - all is non-graphic and happily resolved in Chapter 1! Even with that this is pretty much entirely a fluffbomb.)





	1. The Moor

**Author's Note:**

> I thought what became Chapter 4 would be cute, and then suddenly I was listening to [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVws52PPvEA) on repeat and writing 5000 words of Season 6B fluff. I'm not sure either.
> 
> Injury warning is for Chapter 1 only (and it's nongraphic as is) - the rest is all fluff and Zoe kicking the universe in the teeth.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jamie remembers.

The light dims, and the pain fades, and the rain comes down like a drumbeat. Then darkness rises to meet him until the rain and the grass and the taste of his own blood are gone, until the world is a tangle of cold and haze and shadow.

Through it breaks a voice, distant as if he’s underwater, and he _knows it_. He struggles to open his eyes. “Jamie?” A blurry smudge of a face hovers above him, and he tries to hold on because all at once he needs to, all at once it matters more than anything that he does, but he’s falling.

“Jamie!” 

Darkness drags him down.

 

He wakes, in a light-flooded room, to a steady hum that he knows in his bones. If this is death, if the pipes are calling him, it feels an awful lot like home.

He tries to sit up. Pain slams through him, white-hot, and he cries out and collapses back. Aye then, not dead, he reasons fuzzily. Being dead would hurt less.

When the pain starts to fade he tries to remember, but he’s clumsy and his thoughts are too heavy to move. There was a struggle. A bayonet. The rain. A voice as he was falling. And then… nothing.

There’s a noise then, over the humming: footfalls, loud and rushed and close now. A wee shabby man bursts through the doors with his hands full of bottles and boxes, and Jamie’s world shifts on its axis, something inside his chest pulling tight.

Words start spilling out of the man’s mouth, even as he crosses the room to dump his armful onto the table by the bed. “Oh, Jamie, I’m so sorry, I wouldn’t have left if I’d known you were going to wake up. How are you feeling? Do you...oh.” His voice goes quiet, and he wrings his hands. There’s a bright sort of sorrow on his face, keen and apologetic and reaching around Jamie’s heart to squeeze so tight it aches. His eyes prickle. He doesn’t _know_. 

“Oh… oh, no.” 

“Eh?” says Jamie, or tries to; it comes out a barely-audible croak.

“One thing at a time, shall we? Medicine first.” The Doctor wrings his hands and starts looking through the bottles. The Doctor. Yes. The man from before, the strange wee Englishman who’d talked them off the gallows and out of the ship. But Jamie saw him go, him and the boy and girl with him. How could he be here? Where is here? And what’s winding up in his own chest till it feels like he might break?

“Doctor,” he says, and “ _Doctor_ ,” again.

The Doctor stills, a bottle in one hand. “Yes. Yes, that’s me,” he says.

“I… I don’t…” There’s something. He’s so close to something. The Doctor… something about the Doctor… He stretches, and he falls, and quicker than fog in the sunlight it’s gone. The Doctor is still there, though. “Something’s _wrong_ ,” Jamie pleads.

The Doctor hesitates, and a look of exhaustion shadows his face. “I know,” he says, his words halting like he has to unstick them from each other first. “I promise, we’ll fix this.”

“ _Please_.”

He sighs. “We shall. We simply--we must wait until you mend a little more.” Jamie tries to sit up again, mostly in protest, but the Doctor’s hand on his shoulder pushes him gently down. His head goes wobbly. “You’re still very weak, and you need rest first.” A glass is pressed to his lips, and he drinks; it’s thick and bitter and burns going down. “This will help, and it will put you back to sleep. I’ll be here when you wake.”

“‘S that… ‘s that a promise?” He’s drifting already, but he fights it. He needs to know.

“Yes, Jamie.”

Well, if it is, he thinks with some difficulty, it’s alright. The Doctor steps back, and Jamie can’t bear it. He reaches for the Doctor’s hand, misses, and brushes his sleeve. A moment lapses, and then the Doctor takes his hand. He doesn’t know why it’s right, but it is, and when he falls asleep the Doctor’s hand is still in his.

When he wakes it’s gone, but the Doctor isn’t. He’s sitting in the chair besides the bed, and as Jamie gingerly pushes himself toward sitting again, the Doctor looks over at him. “How are you feeling?” He closes his book. The cover says _A Brief History of The Disappearances on Haldeem Three_.

“I--” begins Jamie, and then he breaks off. He doesn’t--he doesn’t have letters. Never has. It’s hard to breathe suddenly, and he screws his eyes shut. There’s something just past his reach, something that matters more than anything, and he knows it’s here. He knows that the place is right, and he knows he’d follow the Doctor to the ends of the earth. Beyond that, even. He just doesn’t know why. 

Why can’t he remember?

“Jamie?”

He opens his eyes and finds the Doctor looking at him, all exhaustion and concern. “Jamie,” he says, his voice quiet and weary, but through the weariness there’s hope. It feels like a lifeline. “Jamie, do you trust me?”

 _With my life._ “Aye.” 

He sighs like a weight’s been lifted from him and pushes his chair toward the bed. Then he reaches forward, his hand faltering, and brushes Jamie’s hair away from his eyes. “Something was stolen from you, Jamie,” he says, his voice heavy, halting. “You were made to--to forget.”

Made to forget? “‘S that why I cannae--” He shuts his eyes and tries to find words that don’t want to come.. “I know you,” he says, and the knot in his chest winds tighter. “But I.. I don’t....” 

He opens his eyes again when the Doctor’s free hand covers the fist he’s balled into the blankets. “Yes,” he says quietly. “That’s why. And that’s why we must fix it. Allow me to--.”

“Please.” It’s out of his mouth before the Doctor’s stopped talking, and it’s a chorus in his head -- _please, please, please, please_ \-- and he’s still chanting it to himself when the Doctor’s hand moves to his temple. Their foreheads meet, and then the Doctor is in his head. _Easy, Jamie. Stay with me,_ he hears, but it’s the Doctor and he’s gentle and searching and Jamie isn’t afraid. _Please._

He remembers the rout first. Two days ago, even if it feels like a hundred years, gone all cold and bitter. He lets the Doctor guide him past it to yesterday instead.

Yesterday is shocks of blood and vivid frozen moments, and it’s the only clear thing in all the haze. 

He’s in the cottage, keeping vigil, waiting for his laird to die. Then there are strangers. The Doctor. Polly. Ben. _I know them. I know them._

He knows what happens next: the ship, the contracts, the fighting. Then the ship sails, and he stays, and he doesn’t know why but he thinks it might be the Doctor. He goes with the strangers _not strangers_ to their box, and it’s blue as anything, and then-- and then he can’t remember, and pain shoots through his head until he cries out, but he must--

There’s something else, he knows there is, and the Doctor is searching, pushing at the edges of his memory. Something tilts, shifts just so. The pain evaporates, and he hears humming, and--

_“Doctor, can we take him with us?”_

_“If he teaches me to play the bagpipes.”_

_“If you want, Doctor,”_ he says along with himself, and Polly pulls him through the door of the TARDIS, _that’s the box, that’s where we are,_ and it’s--

It’s bigger on the inside. 

So is this. 

He forgets to breathe, and he remembers. Ben. Polly. Victoria. Zoe. The Doctor. 

The Doctor.

It’s a thousand moments all at once. The future and the past and so many strange skies. Helicopters and Ice Warriors and trains underground. Falling out of reality. Robots. Wristwatches. Reading lessons. Running.

Somewhere in the midst of it all he feels the Doctor’s mind start to pull away. _No, please no._ It’s more a feeling than a thought, but he can’t lose him. Not now. Not when in everything he’s remembering the Doctor’s the center of the universe, or at least of his. Not when he’s the only constant on a hundred different worlds. Not -- not when he’s everything. When the Doctor returns, he goes limp with relief, and then he remembers again. 

Remembers feeling like he’d swallowed sunbeams when the Doctor smiled at him. Remembers shame tangling through him -- and then the knots coming undone, _it’s just the same as anything in the future_ , and a dizzy sort of freedom and a new kind of fear.

Then he remembers breaking, remembers losing him and all the light in the world with him. But then he’d walked through the door like nothing had happened, and he remembers going weak with relief then too, and he remembers--he remembers kissing him. Remembers, and remembers, and it’s so simple and so bright and the tangled thing in his chest is loose and blooming and how could he have forgotten this?

The giddiness goes out of him a little when he remembers how. Remembers their goodbye. Zoe’s, too. 

_I won’t forget you_ , he remembers, and then all at once he’s back in the present, shaking hard. It’s so much. It’s everything. The Doctor sits up, and Jamie can still feel him in his head: a quiet, tired joy. It fades, slowly, and then he’s just himself again, and when he raises his eyes, the Doctor is reaching for his handkerchief. He wipes the tears Jamie hadn’t noticed falling from his cheeks, and he smiles, and Jamie feels like he’s swallowed sunbeams. Like the last time. Like all the last times. 

Clumsy and desperate and full of light, Jamie kisses him, kisses him like he’ll drown if he stops, kisses him with his hands tight in the front of his shirt, and the Doctor strokes his hair, gentle and comforting and, more than anything, _there_

When they break apart, Jamie makes a choked little sound and buries his head in the Doctor’s shoulder and pulls him as close as he can, clutching handfuls of his coat. “Hello, Jamie,” says the Doctor into his hair, his voice alight with joy. He rubs circles on his back, gentle, reassuring, and the steady soothing double beat of his hearts is familiar. It’s safe, and it’s right, and Jamie’s never leaving his side again. Not ever.


	2. The Wheel

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Zoe believes.

It’s quite a simple matter of self-observation, really.

She notices the details first. Her hair is shorter than it ought to be, and she’s developed a number of new freckles. The scar on her left leg evidences six months of healing and the one on her right shoulder eight, but she’s sure it was longer than that. She feels it--but that’s preposterous. That’s no evidence at all. She still believes it’s true.

The Doctor and the boy, she decides. They were the anomaly, and they’re the only logical conclusion, even if the root of that conclusion isn’t logical at all. She believes in it anyway.

If she times it right, sneaking into the laboratory to test her unauthorized samples only carries a 14.8% chance of failure. She takes that chance. Her hair indicates exposure to at least a dozen different atmospheres in the last year -- likely more, but the variation is too much to be specific -- and there are temporal indicators of a kind she's never seen before still in her bloodstream. She suspected as much, but now she can prove it.

All that time, and someone’s clearly taken it away on purpose, cutting away at her memories with surgical precision. She knows the shape of the void, now, and with it she runs calculations for how long she’s been gone and where she can place herself. The only problem is that calculations solve very little.

She gets lonely so easily now. _We must have been very good friends,_ says the part of her trained from birth to observe; the rest of her mostly just wants to cry. The others here are distant. Were they always that way? It makes no difference, really, because either way she can't stop herself from reaching for them instinctively, leaning on shoulders, grabbing hands. The looks of pity she gets for it are worse than the ones of horror.

The first time she blurts out that a feeling is the basis of a conclusion, the others look at her like she’s gone mad, and she’s given a very stern talking-to reminding her of how very hard she’s worked to be where she is and how they know she can do better. That’s alright. She knows she can do better, too. 

It’s simple enough to memorize her calculations and their results. It’s even simpler to concoct a fake illness -- a minor case of poisoning, with the antidote hidden in a vial in her shoe -- and it’s simple enough to feign sleep in the sickbay while she searches. They’ve taught her to be very good at searching, after all.

Half in a trance, she finds what she's seeking: a mental block, huge but hastily constructed. Whoever set it up clearly had only a cursory understanding of the human mind. From there, it’s simple enough.

When she comes out of the other side of the avalanche, her heart’s pounding and her head’s brimming and she knows, she knows, she knows. 

She can’t remember the last time she cried, even now, but she cries and she can’t seem to stop. She muffles her tears with the sickbay blankets, and she misses them. Her friends. No. Her family. 

She misses them, and she’s furious, and that only makes her cry more. There was no reason for any of it, none at all. They were going to do something horrible to the Doctor, and they’d stolen her life from her, and Jamie -- her stomach lurches. If they’d put her right back where she’d been, they must have done the same to him. She knows her history. 

Through the speakers curfew is called, and she stares at the dark ceiling, all out of tears. The anger and the grief settle in her chest, and as she lays awake, they ignite.

 _Make something better,_ she thinks. _They weren’t the only ones who stole parts of you. Fight it here. Make it right._ And in the back of her mind, two voices that aren’t quite hers echo their agreement. When she leaves the sickbay come morning, she hasn’t slept, but she is blazing.

The next part is anything but simple. Authority doesn’t like being questioned, of course. Even less so by the librarian. And so they try to stop her, which she’s expected. They try to discredit her, which she’s prepared for. They call her a troublemaker and an upstart, and she’s flattered. After all, she learned it from the best.

It gets easier when she starts finding allies -- or rather, when they start finding her. Women and men, some her age, some even younger, and some who haven’t seen training in fifty years. She reaches out to them, and clumsily, they reach back. Even the Wheel opens toward her, and she’s surprised to find that being a troublemaker doesn’t seem to slow her rise through the ranks. 

When things begin to change, change in earnest, it’s with surprising speed, as if they’ve reached the top of a climb and are all of a sudden falling. They broadcast the signals they’ve traced and the records they’ve collected -- all at once, to everyone. Zoe is in the middle of it, orchestrating, reveling. The training centers suddenly, mysteriously, lose power, just long enough for a few students to escape. And in the heart of the city itself, with her image on a hundred thousand screens, Zoe Heriot challenges the Education Controller while the President looks on.

She could say it’s a calculated risk, but she won’t, because it’s not. It’s faith.

They don’t, of course, get everything. She’d never expected that to happen. But what they do get seems staggering -- the Controller will step down, for one. There will be a special council, and Zoe will be on the special council with people three times her age, and this is where they start. This is where they fix things. The work has only just begun.

Of course, her other work keeps going, and so Captain Heriot, Special Representative to the Educational Alignment Investigation, returns to stellar calculations for a little while. A week later she stops mid-symbol and listens, and she feels the anomaly before it appears on her scanners: just a ripple, a tiny shiver across the back of her neck. The scanner chirps and oh, there it is. She’d know that signature anywhere. 

She laughs out loud and actually claps in the empty room, and then she abandons her calculations mid-formula and runs full-tilt across the station, her heartbeat pounding in her ears as she nearly knocks over a senior officer. 

“...about a year for her, if I’m correct. Oh, dear.” The Doctor’s voice echoes through the corridor, and she’s smiling so hard her face hurts. Here, he’s here.

“You think she’ll be alright?” she hears next, and she has to stop walking for a moment and press her hands to her mouth. 

Her voice gets caught in her throat, but she finds it. “Oh, I think so!” she calls back, and the footsteps around the corner stop abruptly.

Then there are two simultaneous shouts of “Zoe!” and the running starts again at double-time, and there they are -- whole and safe and laughing, and she flings herself forward and gets an arm around each of their necks. They spin around, laughing, saying each other’s names like they don’t know them. She’s definitely crying again, but it’s fine, so’s Jamie. 

When she’s finally back on her feet, arms still around them and theirs around her, the Doctor gives her a funny little look. “Figured it all out on your own, did you?” he asks, but there’s pride in his voice. 

“Well, yes, of course,” she says, and then she wrinkles her nose as Jamie ruffles her hair. “After all, I’m very clever.”

“That you are, Zoe,” says the Doctor. “That you are.”

Later, much later, in front of the open TARDIS doors, he takes her hand. “If you should like,” he says, “you might stow away with us again.”

Nothing she's ever done has been harder than turning them down. She suspects nothing she ever does will be, either. But she has work to do.


	3. The Coast

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Victoria adjusts.

The future, as it turns out, is quite nice once it stops trying to kill her.

It feels as if that should make it easier, but somehow it seems to do the opposite. It's hard, here, to feel like she belongs. She misses her home and her father, and she misses the stars sometimes too. Sometimes her dreams of it are nightmares, but more often now it’s unearthly mountains, sunsets in strange skies, and her friends. She misses the Doctor’s smile and Jamie’s hugs and the quiet little humming of her room in the TARDIS that always, somehow, felt kind.

The Harrises are kind too, and she’ll forever be grateful to them, but she’s glad, really, that they don’t try to understand. “Dreaming about the stars, Victoria?” one of them will ask, and she’ll nod. Then they’ll make her tea, and that will be that. It’s for the best -- she could hardly explain, anyhow. 

One day, while she’s waiting for a bus, it strikes her out of nowhere. This isn’t the future. Not any more. There’s no time like the present, and she can do--well--almost anything.

Before long the public librarians know her by name as she tries to catch up on a century of knowledge. She learns to type. She writes to Colonel, now Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart and offers her knowledge of the foes they’d faced, limited though it is. It might help his men, after all, and when he replies he speaks of a new division to face this sort of threat, so she’ll offer what she can. She can hardly do less than that.

It’s a beautiful summer morning when she takes the books from her correspondence course out to sit in sight of the ocean. The waves are gentle, and the sun is high, and she takes careful notes on scientific theory under the shade of a spreading tree. 

The breeze ruffles the pages of her book, and on it she thinks she hears -- no. She’s being silly, she tells herself. He can’t control where he lands, can he? For a long moment she watches the seabirds, suddenly wistful and far away, and then she returns to her notes.

Boots crunch on gravel, and down the beach there’s a tremendous, familiar shout. “VICTORIA!”

She turns, her heart in her throat, and there they are, two little figures shouting and waving and running at her. She drops her book and scrambles to her feet just in time for Jamie to scoop her up and swing her into a tight hug. A little too tight, perhaps -- by the time he puts her down, looking slightly apologetic, her ribs hurt. But it's alright, Anything would be alright now except perhaps Yetis. She laughs and hugs him in turn, pushing herself onto her toes, and he’s more gentle this time. “It’s good to see you,” he says, his voice going a bit wobbly.

“There we are,” comes the Doctor’s voice, and she extricates herself from Jamie to dart over and hug him too. He’s as small and odd as she remembers and quite possibly shabbier, and he smiles down at her. “Hello, my dear. Hello. I’ve missed you.”

“I’ve missed you too,” she says, kissing him on the cheek. 

“Don’t I get one too?” Jamie teases, and oh, she’s missed them more than she even knew. She laughs and kisses his cheek too, and then she steps back and really looks at them. They’re a little older, perhaps, but they're the same as the day she left them. It makes her heart sing and breaks it, a little.

She smiles helplessly at them and asks, “Is this a social call, Doctor?”

“I suppose so,” he says. “We had the opportunity to visit you, and so, here we are.”

Here they are.

In the Harrises’ kitchen they have tea and half a leftover cake and some sandwiches that Jamie helps her make, and they tell her stories, interrupting each other at every turn. There are monsters and danger and names she doesn't know, but mostly it's them. The kitchen fills with easy laughter, and they stay long after the tea goes cold.

“Oh, goodness,” says the Doctor, as Jamie finishes the last sandwich. “And what about you, Victoria?”

“I… I don't have any stories. I've only been getting used to it here, I suppose.”

“That sounds like a story,” he says with a smile. So she tells them, and she feels a little more certain as she does. “Well done,” says the Doctor at last. “I do hope you’ve been happy here.”

“Yes,” she tells him, and her certainty is sudden but it’s absolute. “Yes, very.”


	4. The Garden

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Doctor and Jamie crash a wedding.

The celebrations crowd into the garden behind Polly's parents’ house, where it’s all laughter and flowers and golden sunset light. 

There was disapproval, of course. There is disapproval. But they’ve put it aside for her, for them. She caught her father laughing at one of Ben’s jokes last week, and the last time she saw her mother she was deep in conversation with Ben’s mum, and it’s more than she could have hoped. Even her grandmother came around in the end -- which alone was something of a miracle -- and now she's lecturing some Navy bigwig at her table, and Polly's wearing her pearls.

Ben nudges her, pulling her out of her thoughts. “Hey,” he says. 

“Hey yourself.” She smiles, again. At her husband. She’s been smiling all day. Her face aches, but she can’t stop and she doesn’t want to. Ben looks just as dazed as she feels, and she squeezes his hand under the table. His smile is wide and a little dopey and perfect. Hers probably is too.

“You’re revolting, the both of you.” They both turn, and Ben rolls his eyes. Her brother Will’s snuck up from the house, his arms full of spare chains of paper flowers, and he shoots her a grin before dumping the flowers cheerfully onto Ben’s head. Ben yelps, and Will cackles before darting back into the house.

“Oi, watch it!” Ben calls after him, but he can't keep a straight face. Polly dissolves into giggles as he picks the flowers off his suit and drops them onto his empty dessert plate. The last chain is bright pink, and he considers it for a moment before slinging it over her shoulders instead. “Suits the dress, Duchess.”

She leans forward to bump her nose against his and kisses him for good measure. “Doesn’t that make you the Duke now?”

He makes a face of mock horror. “Sure hope not.”

She laughs and marvels, again, at how they got here. The past. The future. The moon. And now, the Wrights’ garden. For a moment they both watch the others at their tables and listen to the low, happy hum of eight conversations at once.

“Wish we could’ve told them the truth,” says Ben, quiet enough that no one else can hear him. 

“Yes,” she says, and she follows Ben’s gaze up to the dusk-blue sky. 

It’s been easy enough to let people think that their romance was all normal, all dance clubs and shore leave, letting them fill in the where and when and how. It’s been less easy to have to keep the real story to themselves: the year that had only passed for them, the scrapes they’d got each other into and out of, and the strange shores where they’d fallen in love. 

Will knows the whole story, and so does their mother - Polly had to tell someone. Ben’s mum knows too. But no one else is any the wiser. The only others who do know -- well, they could hardly send an invitation.

“More wine?” Ben asks, taking both their glasses. 

“Yes, that sounds lovely.” He aims a kiss at her forehead and mostly hits her eyebrow instead, and then he darts toward the house. As he goes, in the far corner of the garden there’s a noise. She’s sure, for a moment, that she’s imagining it.

She’s not imagining it. 

She’s on her feet without realizing it, and there’s a noise of shattering glass behind her. Ben’s standing in the doorway, staring, as in the corner of the garden materializes something big and blue and wonderful. 

Everyone else has gone silent, staring in bewilderment, and as the door of the box swings open Polly has the slightly hysterical realization that they’re on the wrong side of the fence.

She laughs so hard she starts crying, laughs so hard she has to lean on the table to stay on her feet, and when she can finally wipe her eyes and grab Ben’s hand and drag him toward the back of the garden, still laughing, they’re still climbing the fence.

“Well,” says the Doctor, at the top of the fence, “we _nearly_ made it.”

“Need a hand?” asks Ben, trying and failing to keep from laughing. The Doctor takes him up on it. Jamie, on the other hand, leaps from the top of the fence and makes a pained “Ooh” noise when he lands.

“Nothing broken?” 

“‘M fine.”

The Doctor helps him to his feet before turning abruptly to Ben and Polly, reaching toward them in delight. “Look at the two of you!”

Polly glances over her shoulder -- her grandmother is still staring, white as a sheet -- and then hugs them both. Jamie picks her up off the ground, and she shrieks with laughter, and the Doctor says something she can’t quite make out but there’s so much pride in his voice she knows what it is anyway. 

“You showed up,” says Ben, half into Jamie’s shoulder. “Can’t say I expected that.”

“Well,” says the Doctor, clapping him on the back, “we made the time.”

They’re rather guilty of ignoring their other guests after that, but Polly can’t bring herself to care. They talk and laugh for hours after the party was meant to end. The Doctor introduces himself to her nonplussed parents and Ben’s equally nonplussed mum. They dance. It’s well into the small hours before the Doctor and Jamie share a guilty look. “We’ve outstayed our welcome, I think,” he says.

“Nonsense!” says Polly. “You can stay in the guestroom.”

The Doctor shakes his head. “We’re in a bit of a… restricted situation, unfortunately. My people are keeping tabs on us. We found enough time for this, but as much as we’d like to stay…” 

Ben starts to ask a question, but Jamie interrupts. “Doctor,” he says, leaning over to rest a hand on the Doctor’s arm. “Doctor, you’ve forgot the present.”

“Oh!” says the Doctor, lighting up. “Oh, so I have!” He goes digging in his impossible pockets, and after a while he produces a small parcel wrapped in blue paper and twine. He presses it into Polly’s hands. “Open this once we’re gone, will you? No, don’t say anything. Wait. And open it.”

She looks over at Ben, who shrugs and grins. “If you say so, Doctor. And -- thank you. Thank you for coming.”

“No, no.” He takes both their hands. “Thank you. And go on to tomorrow, and look out for each other.”

“We’ll do our best, Doctor.”

Jamie sweeps them both into a hug, and Polly pulls the Doctor in too, and when they finally let go, there’s more laughter and Ben helps boost them over the fence. At the TARDIS door, the Doctor turns and waves, one last time, and they stand at the fence until the last echoes fade into the night.

Under the kitchen lights, they unwrap the paper and find a bright-red book with a blank cover. Polly opens it, and two envelopes slide out. The top one says, in a big blocky hand, CONGRATULATIONS POLLY AND BEN!, and she can’t help but smile at it - he could hardly write his name when they left.

She moves the letters aside carefully to see inside the book, and the she stops.

There’s a photo of the two of them, laughing at something. The next page is another -- Ben, waving from the top of a blue mountain, a picture Polly took on another world. Some blurry shots of them from the time she taught Jamie to use the camera. There are more than she remembers taking or having taken, glimpses of strange places and wonderful things. The last one in the book is of all four of them. They’re smiling, and the Doctor is a little out of focus.

“How’d they…?”

“Does it matter how?” she asks.

“Suppose not,” he says, and kisses her.


End file.
